A Wanderer in Florence eBook

S. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, a member of the
same family that plotted against the Medici and owned
the sacred flints, was born in 1566, and, says Miss
Dunbar, [8] “showed extraordinary piety from
a very tender age”. When only a child herself
she used to teach small children, and she daily carried
lunch to the prisoners. Her real name was Catherine,
but becoming a nun she called herself Mary Magdalene.
In an illness in which she was given up for dead,
she lay on her bed for forty days, during which she
saw continual visions, and then recovered. Like
S. Catherine of Bologna she embroidered well and painted
miraculously, and she once healed a leprosy by licking
it. She died in 1607.

The old English Cemetery, as it is usually called—­the
Protestant Cemetery, as it should be called—­is
an oval garden of death in the Piazza Donatello, at
the end of the Via di Pinti and the Via Alfieri, rising
up from the boulevard that surrounds the northern half
of Florence. (The new Protestant Cemetery is outside
the city on the road to the Certosa.) I noticed, as
I walked beneath the cypresses, the grave of Arthur
Hugh Clough, the poet of “Dipsychus,” who
died here in Florence on November 13th, 1861; of Walter
Savage Landor, that old lion (born January 30th, 1775;
died September 17th, 1864), of whom I shall say much
more in a later chapter; of his son Arnold, who was
born in 1818 and died in 1871; and of Mrs. Holman Hunt,
who died in 1866. But the most famous grave is
that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who lies beneath
a massive tomb that bears only the initials E.B.B.
and the date 1861. “Italy,” wrote
James Thomson, the poet of “The City of Dreadful
Night,” on hearing of Mrs. Browning’s death,

The Cascine is the “Bois” of Florence;
but it does not compare with the Parisian expanse
either in size or attraction. Here the wealthy
Florentines drive, the middle classes saunter and ride
bicycles, the poor enjoy picnics, and the English
take country walks. The further one goes the
better it is, and the better also the river, which
at the very end of the woods becomes such a stream
as the pleinairistes love, with pollarded trees on
either side. Among the trees of one of these
woods nearly a hundred years ago, a walking Englishman
named Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his “Ode to
the West Wind”.